Inaugural (Regular) Post

I promised earlier this month that I’d start doing some regular posts and tonight it’s time for the first one. I have three main topics/themes planned though I’m open to suggestions for more:

Writing process/advice/rants/details

Book progress/day-to-day

Short stories/serials

First, some background and general knowledge off the top of my head.

In case you didn’t know from the myriad of times I’ve mentioned it in my books or on my website, I’ve been writing since 2012. I started writing on a whim; I had finished up a big project in late 2011 and wanted to try some new things out. I’ve always been a writer so I figured ‘hey, let’s see if I can publish something.’ 2012-2013 was the “gold rush” of publishing (which I didn’t know at the time) and I ended up writing a series of non-fiction books that sold a good quarter million copies as well as Final dawn, which also sold a quarter million copies.

So I guess you could say I saw (and am still seeing) some success. I stopped publishing for a few years because, after Final Dawn was done, I let my inclination to run around trying a million different projects get the better of me. At the tail end of 2016 I started getting the hankering for trying writing again and spent the first month of 2017 compiling Final Dawn into an omnibus format. It went exceedingly well (and still does well even 5 months later).

I have a pretty wide range of experience at doing… well……. everything related to indie publishing. I’ve made my own covers (though I outsource that now to an awesome designer), I take care of all of my own advertising (through Facebook, Bookbub, Amazon’s ad system [AMS]), I manage my own social media and email and newsletters and on and on and on.

There’s SO much minutiae involved with being a writer that the act of creating and writing down a story is probably 30% of the work. Maybe 40%. 60%-70% of it is figuring out how to reach readers and convincing them to give you a try. I sure as heck am glad my readers gave me a try and I have to put in an enormous amount of work every single day to get more folks to give my books a try.

So yeah, being a full-time writer isn’t all about writing. That’s like… 30% of your day. The rest of it is spent doing decidedly non-writing things. I don’t know how it is in the traditional publishing world but I’m told it’s not much different except you have even less control over what happens (unless you’re a household name, of course).

I’ll have more on this subject later. I really want to dig in to the whole indie writing thing because there’s a lot going on right now in 2017 that mirrors what happened five years ago and there’s a lot that folks can learn about listening to the “big names” in indie writing and such. I think so, at least.